Retired Gen. Colin Powell came to the Naval Academy a few years ago. He bounded onto the stage, looking fit and trim, and very energetic. He launched into a prepared address—his Forrestal Lecture—without notes, without the slightest hesitation, and without a teleprompter. The 4,000 Midshipmen who are required to attend and some of whom, frankly, doze off during these “Bore-us-all” lectures, were sitting on the edge of their seats. Gen. Powell is a polished orator and a most engaging speaker. His use of self-deprecating wit is most effective.

He related his great career—from Army Second Lieutenant all the way to four-star General and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He didn’t have to mention that when he was born, nearly seventy years before, no black man could have aspired to lead the greatest military in the world.

He said that his career was defined by one word: containment. Containment of the Soviet Union was what he was doing when, as a junior officer in the Army he was stationed in West Germany. Ten years later, as a major, Powell was told again. “Go to the Berlin Wall, turn left. Stop at the Fulda Gap. And don’t let any Soviet tanks come through.”

Finally, he said, as a four-star general, he was still engaged in containment. Except now, under President George H.W. Bush, his job was to oversee the entire scene of the East-West face-off. Gen. Powell was responsible for making sure that the United States and NATO would not be surprised by any Soviet thrust into Western Europe.

All of this was most impressive. Gen. Powell is the kind of smart, courageous, skilled professional you would want guarding the Fulda Gap, standing watch for our freedom at the Wall.

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President Obama spoke to an interviewer about the Ft. Hood shootings. He had just come from the Memorial Service for the fourteen people whose lives were taken by the terrorist, Nidal Hasan:

OBAMA:  In a country of 300 million people, there are going to be acts of violence that are inexplicable, even within the extraordinary military that we have. I think everybody understands how outstanding the young men and women in uniform are under the most severe stress.  There are going to instances, in which an individual cracks.

Forget, for the moment, this confused part of the statement that seems to psychologize the killer’s actions. I want to focus on the “inexplicable” part.

This is a serious problem for liberals. They are forever finding such murderous acts inexplicable. They often employ words like “random” and “senseless acts of violence.” One of their favorite bumper stickers is “Practice random acts of kindness.” Random is okay if it’s kind. But if kindness and terror are truly random, what’s the moral difference?

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Ronald Reagan brought two things to Washington that were very much out of fashion, I enjoy telling student interns at Family Research Council: brown suits and freedom for a hundred million people in Eastern Europe. When Reagan swept into office in a landslide in 1980, the reigning view of Washington’s foreign policy elites toward Eastern Europe was that expressed in the Sonnenfeldt Doctrine. State Department Counselor Helmut Sonnenfeldt in the 1970s was a disciple of Henry Kissinger. TIME Magazine explained Sonnefeldt’s ideas:

He was quoted as saying that U.S. policy in Eastern Europe should “strive for an evolution that makes the relationship between the Eastern Europeans and the Soviet Union an organic one.” The use of the word organic seemed to imply that he was advocating that the Soviet Union and its satellites should form one whole—a position calculated to infuriate not only G.O.P. conservatives but also ethnic groups with roots in Eastern Europe.

In simple American English, the U.S. policy toward Eastern Europe should not rock the boat.

Ronald Reagan’s view could not be further from those espoused by the Kissingers, Sonnenfeldts, and the foreign policy establishments of both political parties. Reagan had told Richard Allen, who would one day serve in the White House as Reagan’s National Security Adviser, that his idea of East-West relations was simple: We win. They lose.

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